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“... novel and fifth book; her first books had been biographies, of her father’s famous family and of Edward Burne-Jones. She was 62 when she won the Booker, a widow and the mother of three grown-up children, and although no longer in straits as desperate as those she had drawn on for the novel, she was accustomed to making do ...”

“... A special 25th anniversary edition of Edward O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Consensus was published in March. Harvard University Press are advertising it together with Richard Lewontin’s new book, The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, Environment, presumably to let everyone know they’re not taking sides. Lewontin and Wilson, fiercely opposed to each other intellectually, used to have labs one directly above the other at Harvard (and weren’t on speaking terms) – an arrangement curiously reproduced in the design of the new ad ...”

“... but a partisan politician of a narrow and trumpeting sort. With a couple of exceptions, Elwyn Jones for one, his comments about opponents are not particularly generous – Hugh Gaitskell is ‘harem-bred’ and ‘tearful’ while Hailsham’s own political tears are recorded as proof of sincere passion. Attlee, rightly cynical about his first essay at ...”

“... at Ely and St Albans, and St Mark’s in Venice. In September 1880 he told Georgiana Burne-Jones: ‘I have more than ever at my heart the importance for people of living in beautiful places; I mean the sort of beauty which would be attainable by all, if people could but begin to long for it. I do most earnestly desire that something more startling ...”

“... who ran the country so well for three centuries. Consider the ‘pathetic’ abdication of Edward VIII: ‘For surely, with the benefit of hindsight, we can now recognise that the truly remarkable aspect of the abdication was not the king’s irresponsible hedonism but the establishment’s revulsion – strong enough to force him off the throne ...”

“... in a form of siege warfare is appealing – Welsh hordes flinging themselves over the walls of Edward I’s castles, pitchforks at the ready – but sadly without foundation: at the first modern Olympic Games, in Athens in 1896, William Hoyt of the USA claimed the gold medal for clearing 10'10"; and he didn’t have to carry any heavy weaponry. Even the ...”

“... in a bit of avant-garde transvestite theatre. The Queen, obviously, would play the King; and Edward, who after all has a theatrical background, could make an excellent Cordelia. Sven-Göran Eriksson should direct; and if Tony Blair is too busy to play the Fool, perhaps Martin Amis, who has been tentatively sticking up for the Royals in the New ...”

“... men who struggled most with life in the dolls’ house. Ridley’s biography of George’s father, Edward VII, showed how as prince of Wales he sank into an analgesic round of gargantuan meals, card playing, shooting and ponderous intercourse with society ladies. Unwilling to become the signing automaton of constitutional theory after his accession, ...”

“... Edward​ III liked to dress up as a bird. In 1348, at a tournament in Bury St Edmunds, he revealed himself as a gleaming pheasant with copper-pipe wings and real feathers. The next year, celebrating Christmas with the archbishop of Canterbury, he wore a white buckram harness spangled with three hundred leaves of silver, adorned with one of his mottoes: ‘Hay hay the wythe swan/by godes soule I am thy man ...”

“... particularly fine episode concerns Schomberg, the rascally innkeeper in Victory, and the devilish Jones, whose traces Young discovers in Pulan Laut in 1977. Along with Young on that trip there is also Wilfred Thesiger, the celebrated traveller who spent years among the desert Arabs; he seems withdrawn and strangely out of place on the yacht Fiona, as it ...”

“... spirit’. Perhaps too medieval: Webb’s macabre wedding gift was a bedroom wardrobe decorated by Edward Burne-Jones with the blood libel story from Chaucer’s ‘Prioress’s Tale’. The Virgin Mary – modelled by Jane – tends to St Nicholas, who had his throat cut by the Jews before miraculously returning to ...”

“... backwards in assuaging their environmental concerns. What he was proposing to do wasn’t just bad PR, it amounted to wilful sabotage. He bounced about in his chair crossly. Conveyed he thought that I was half Red spy, half dogooder academic. Card marked ... I see that everyone’s career is predicated on the horrendous Soviet ‘threat’. But that’s all ...”

“... decline. For America . . . well, a country that could tolerate Clinton in the White House and Edward Kennedy in public view will buy anything, as P.T. Barnum observed, and the transatlantic tendency to embrace the latest craze is one of their more endearing traits, but for Britain to swallow – or at least to accept at ...”

“... Is Exporting Fear, Globalising Risk and Making Us All Less Secure (Chicago, £19), Lynn Klotz and Edward Sylvester make a compelling case for a radical and immediate change in America’s biosecurity policy. Since 9/11, according to the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, the US government has spent $50 billion on its biodefence programme: Klotz ...”

“... sympathies, as many ‘conformable puritans’ did in that period. Some biographers believe, as Edward Jones notes in his learned overview of archives relating to the young poet, that Milton lost sympathy with orthodox worship when an inspection of Horton parish church in 1637 required that the raised pew occupied by the Milton family should be lowered ...”